Friday, November 27, 2015

Black Friday and onto Small Business Saturday

It's Black Friday and I feel that I should do something commerce related like post coupons or sales.

The truth of the matter is that I really don't care too much for marketing.

My experience is marketers of the modern-mindset tend to do negative things in their efforts to control markets.

Marketing gimmicks like Black Friday tend to be dominated by big commerce and big media.

I like the idea of Small Business Saturday. This is a gimmick invented by American Express in which people are coaxed to support small local businesses after Black Friday.

The Community Color project fits this format better. This project lists web sites from select local communities in the Mountain West. The main page lists directories for Arizona, Colorado and Utah.

NOTE: I started this project by creating sites for towns in Idaho and Montana. That project was taken over by a different group. I kept the domain Missoula.WS because my partner didn't like the WS TLD.

Originally, I intended to make sites for towns. The ArizonaColor.US has a county focus.

The first design included numerous interactive features. I discovered that the people who make posts on general information sites tend to rude; So, I removed all the interactive features.

I wanted to include maps and other resources. Unfortunately, I ran out of diskspace. I will be switching web hosts with the release of PHP 7 and might start reading interactive features.

Basically, if you live in the Mountain West, you can go to the site and find directories with links to local businesses. I fund the project by listing affiliate programs for national web sites. My plan was to create a structure in which big business funded free listings for small business.

To be truthful, the sites barely make enough money to pay my web hosting fees, but, as I said at the beginning of this post. I am not very good at marketing. I want to find ways that give small business and individuals a voice to counter big media and big business. But this is really not something that people support.

BTW, the site aFountainOfBargains.com is my attempt at affiliate marketing. Anything I make from that effort goes to pay the web hosting fees for the community sites.